Simple eOrders helps Hilti streamline their processes and cut costs

The Hilti Group manufactures and supplies products for the construction, building maintenance and mining industries, primarily to the professional end-user. Alongside its core expertise in anchoring systems, firestops and installation systems, Hilti also manufactures and supplies tools including cordless electric and heavy angle drills, laser levels and power saws. 

 

The Hilti Challenge 

Hilti, a SAP user, was looking to increase the efficiency of its back-office processes which, like in many B2B companies, relied heavily on paperwork and manual processes costing too much time and money. Hilti wanted to significantly reduce the manual processing of incoming purchase orders from customers saving time and money as well as reducing errors.

The Customer Satisfaction Manager at Hilti, Andy Fardon, wanted to reduce the time and costs involved in enabling new customer eTrading relationships. Andy also wanted to lower the bar so that customers placing lower volumes of orders could also get onboard with using more efficient automated processes.  

Some eTrading solutions on the market rely on older scanning and OCR technology to convert a document into data to feed into a back-office system.  These solutions are notoriously inaccurate and still require a lot of staff time as part of the process. 

Integrating the customer and supplier systems using EDI works well but it’s complex, expensive and only feasible for high-volume business. 

 

The Open ECX Solution 

Construction eTrading specialist Open ECX, adopts a uniquely different approach than other solution providers.  

Hilti worked with Open ECX to use its Email-to-Business (E2B) technology to allow their customers to switch from paper-based orders to email based PDF orders that can be integrated and automatically processed by Hilti’s back office system. 

Whilst Open ECX can provide EDI technology, they also offer a cloud-based SaaS solution based on extracting data from PDF documents which are attached to emails. This is a simple and highly reliable way to automatically process incoming documents such as purchase orders.  

With the Open ECX eOrders system, all the customer needs to do is create a purchase order in PDF format and send it to an email address setup for Hilti. Simple! 

 

Download the full case study to learn about the full integration process and all the business benefits achieved by Hilti.